While Seoul Sleeps Next Door

The neighbours are at it again — not fighting, just existing loudly, the way the couple in 4B always did after eleven: a burst of laughter, a chair dragged, someone's drama serial turned up past any reasonable volume. The sounds came through the wall like they owned the place, thin and specific, and Jiyeon had learned to sleep through worse. She told herself this. She was almost asleep.

Then Hyunwoo's hand moved.

It was a slow thing, unhurried, crossing the sheet the way water finds a low point. He didn't speak. The room held only the stripe of amber streetlight that cut through the curtain gap and lay across the foot of the bed, and his hand moved through it briefly — she caught that, the back of his knuckles lit for a second — before it reached the hem of her sleep shirt and stopped there. Resting. Asking nothing yet.

She kept her eyes on the ceiling.

The cotton was so thin it was almost not there, the fabric washed to the texture of a sigh, and when his fingertips pressed slightly upward along her thigh she became aware of the exact temperature difference between his palm and the sheet. Warm. Deliberate. She exhaled through her nose and thought: not tonight. Thought it clearly. Filed it away as a decision made.

Next door, someone laughed again — a woman's laugh, bright and unselfconscious, followed by a low murmur that didn't travel as well through drywall.

Her hips moved.

Not much. Just a tilt, the kind a body makes when it has already finished an argument the mind hasn't started. She felt it happen from the outside, almost, the way you notice a door swinging open before you remember reaching for it. The sleep shirt rode up another centimetre. Hyunwoo's hand didn't chase the movement; it simply remained, and the remaining was worse than if he'd pressed forward.

"You're supposed to be asleep," she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended, which was its own kind of betrayal.

He said nothing. She could feel the shape of him paying attention.

She pressed her wrist to her mouth — not yet for any reason she'd admit, just to have something to press against. Her jaw was tight. The stripe of streetlight hadn't moved. Next door the drama serial swelled into what sounded like a confrontation scene, strings and raised voices, and she was acutely aware that any sound she made would travel just as freely in the other direction.

That was the part she kept returning to, even as her breath went shallower and her hand found the sheet beside her hip and gripped it: the wall was thin, and the night was still, and she was already losing the argument with herself in the dark.